The Dayenu of Diasporic Cooking
On our annual Passover seder, an exploration of Judaism-in-motion
As a kid, I was about as enthused about my identity as a Jewish person as anyone could be. I participated in my synagogue’s youth choir (full of the greatest Debbie Friedman hits), read Anne Frank’s diary the way other kids read the Babysitters’ Club, and devoured the staples of the American Jewish culinary canon with gusto. But I rarely looked forward to Passover—that annual event where the talking about eating long preceded the eating itself, and where the foods served felt themselves like forty years in a culinary desert. (I still cannot stand the sweetness of Manischewitz, and the only gefilte fish I have ever truly loved was one that my non-Jewish partner made for me, based on a Bon Appetit recipe from the late ‘90s. No surprise, no jar of gelatin or whitefish puree here.) As a kid, I couldn’t stand the taste of matzoh no matter what my middle school cafeteria did to it, and at the seder itself, the thing I most wanted to eat was the hard-boiled egg (beitza) on the seder plate. In short, I didn’t see much of the holiday’s appeal: it didn’t represent what I loved about Judaism, or Jewish food, and I couldn’t get on board.
But sometime around college—and perhaps informed by living in a rural college town in Ohio—my attitude about my own Judaism, especially in its culinary forms, began to change. I started keeping matzah on hand in my dorm room throughout the year (frequently slathered with hummus or Nutella), and became unreasonably excited when I found a six-pack of Dr. Brown’s black cherry soda at the local grocery store. And though I never participated in Hillel activities on campus, I began to truly understand my own Judaism as defined as much by contemporary culture as it was by religious practice or historical context. When I moved to New York after graduation, it felt like an opportunity to restate my own approach to Judaism through a practice that merged my love of history, storytelling, and food at long last—a seder table where food was not just symbolically resonant, but also culturally dynamic.
With this in mind, I started the tradition of a global Passover seder more than 10 years ago, which my then-boyfriend now-husband happily co-signed. This forma allowed for a wide culinary exploration of food cultures and ways of applying the central templates of the Passover dinner (lamb, tzimmes, and of course gefilte fish, among others) to a huge range of palates. We initially approached this with nothing more than culinary gusto— “sure, let’s do brisket, but do it with Coca-Cola”—but then realized it was an opportunity to expand the Passover story to be both a specific holiday of Jewish commemoration and commensality and a chance to think about the greater diasporic narrative at the evening’s core. What started as one Southern-inspired dish turned into a spread of sweet potato tzimmes, fried catfish with horseradish sauce, poke salat. The seder table, if done this way, could be everywhere.
Since we started, we’ve done it all: dishes inspired by Mexican cuisine, Cantonese and Sichuan cooking, Appalachian foods (my favorite, though far from kosher when we decided on venison), Indian favorites (gulab jamun made with matzo meal), and (last year) French delicacies (boeuf bourguignon, hold the bacon). Additionally, our table has almost always included friends who’ve never once attended a conventional seder. It’s a joy to hear them read out the Four Questions, drop wine onto their plates with the naming of each plague, and shout out “Dayenu” with the gusto that can only come with four liturgically-required glasses of wine.
This year, we decided to go Italian with a menu informed by the long history and honed culinary traditions of the Jews of Italy. (If you can spot them in the image at top, this included roast lamb with rosemary and myrtle leaves, a tzimmes-inspired risotto, and, yes, matzo lasagne.) This was perhaps the first time in hosting these seders that I had multiple sources to consult for recipes—not only Joan Nathan’s impeccable King Solomon’s Table, but also Joyce Goldstein’s Cucina Ebraica, Benedetta Jasmine Guetta’s Cooking Alla Giudia, and Leah Koenig’s forthcoming Portico. In reading these books, I was reminded that Jews have shaped Italian cuisine in profound and unmistakable ways since the days of ancient Rome. Moreover, the Jews of Italy brought their own diasporic cuisines with them, be they the sarde in saor (shaped by Sephardic Jewish merchants living in Venice), eggplant fried and seasoned with vinegar (a dish informed by Jewish-Arab contact in Spain and brought to Italy, where many believed to be poisonous until the end of the seventeenth century), or the famed fritti plates of baccala, squash blossoms, and carciofi alla giudia sold by the Jewish street vendors in Rome. Moreover, many of these culinary innovations occurred during periods of intense subjugation. As Guetta notes in her excellent introduction, “During the Jewish-Roman wars, beginning in 66 CE and spanning seventy years, thousands of Jews were taken from Jersusalem to Rome as slaves, an event depicted in images on the famous Arch of Titus, near the Roman Forum”. (10-11) During the first century, more than 50,000 Jews resided in Rome, and though they eventually won their freedom and became major contributors to the country’s wealth, culture, and history, their descendants would face multiple periods of expulsion and persecution all the way to the twentieth century. (I had not known that the word “ghetto” was coined in Venice in 1516, derived from the word “getto”, likely referring to the first location on the site of a former foundry.)
Why celebrate the Jewish culinary contributions to a country that so frequently abused the Jewish people? Why shift the lens of Passover again and again to incorporate the many places where Jews have set down roots, but never been fully welcomed or embraced by their countrymen? I don’t pretend to have a neat answer for how cooking a meal of hybridized culinary traditions offers a formula for reconciliation or remembrance, and I certainly don’t believe that cooking and celebration erases all wounds. If anything, Passover is a holiday that reminds us to never forget, to always retell the story that “once we were enslaved, but now we are free, “ and therefore to never take that freedom for granted. One addition we made to our seder plate was the inclusion of an orange, a way of intentionally addressing the marginalization of many within their own religions, and a chance to bring those marginalized back to the seder table, so we may together spit out the seeds of hatred and bigotry and see ourselves as segments of a larger, sweeter whole. I like the fact that Passover makes us take the food literally—each item on the table is not simply metaphorical, it becomes an opportunity for engaging with the larger questions that the holiday invokes. And it does so while foregrounding not just suffering, but also pleasure—as the Haggadah wraps up, and we finally sit down to eat the meal, the old adage comes to mind one more: “They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.”
What is the endurance of diasporic cuisines but proof that a record, a life, a culture survives because we continue to tell its story, to bring it to life at the table or on the stovetop? Recipes are records, and reading and eating together summons whole histories of lived experience back to the table. And even if all we have are the dishes to bring those stories to life, then dayenu for that.
Recommendation: Can it really be Passover if I don’t drop an endorsement for Rick Moranis’ My Mother’s Brisket? To do otherwise would be a shanda.
The Perfect Bite: Our seder was actually the second of the week; earlier in the week we attended one at my mother and stepfather’s home, where they prepared a spread of delicious dishes (including a fabulous brisket with star anise and plums) and featured a few key items from Inna’s Kitchen Culinaria in Newton. It’s a really wonderful small business with fantastic food, and I can’t recommend them enough whether you’re a frequent dabbler in kosher cuisine or brand new to it. (Superb matzoh ball soup.)
Cooked & Consumed: I mean, everything at our table was fantastic. But I was particularly pleased by our stand-in for gefilte fish via baccalà mantecato, a whipped cod and potato dish that was popularized by Venetian Jews in the 18th century. I adapted this recipe from Lidia Bastianich, and it turned out perfectly:
Whipped Salt Cod (Baccalà Mantecato)
Makes 1 quart
1 pound salt cod
½ pound potatoes, washed but left whole with skins on
2 garlic cloves, minced
½ cup light cream or half-and-half
1 cup extra-virgin olive oil
Soak the salt cod for 24 hours in cold water, changing the water often to remove excess salt. Cut the cod into 6-inch pieces and put them in a medium saucepan; cover with water and bring to a boil. Cook the cod for about 20 minutes, until it just begins to flake. Save ½ cup of the poaching water, then drain the cod and set aside.
Bring a small pot of water to boil, then add the potatoes and cook until easily pierced with a knife, about 10 minutes. Let them cool, and then peel and set aside.
In a food processor with a blade attachment, pulse the cooked cod a few times to break up the fish. Add the minced garlic and pulse a few more times, then add the potato and light cream and puree for 1-2 minutes. Continue to puree while adding the olive oil in a thin stream, until it comes together in a smooth and feathery-light spread. (If the mixture is too dense, thin it with some of the reserved cod poaching liquid.) Transfer the spread to an airtight container and refrigerate until ready to serve.
Before serving, remove from the refrigerator and bring to room temperature (or even warm for 30 seconds in the microwave.) Taste and season with freshly ground black pepper before serving.
Lovely article. Thanks.